The Original Charter School Vision

Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997, was an early advocate of charter schools.CreditCreditWilliam E. Sauro/The New York Times

ALTHOUGH the leaders of teachers unions and charter schools are often in warring camps today, the original vision for charter schools came from Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

In a 1988 address, Mr. Shanker outlined an idea for a new kind of public school where teachers could experiment with fresh and innovative ways of reaching students. Mr. Shanker estimated that only one-fifth of American students were well served by traditional classrooms. In charter schools, teachers would be given the opportunity to draw upon their expertise to create high-performing educational laboratories from which the traditional public schools could learn.

Mr. Shanker was particularly inspired by a 1987 visit to a public school in Cologne, Germany, which stood out for a couple of reasons. Teams of teachers had considerable say in how the school was run. They made critical decisions about what and how to teach and stayed with each class of students for six years. And unlike most German schools, which are rigidly tracked, the Cologne school had students with a mix of abilities, family incomes and ethnic origins. Turkish and Moroccan immigrants were educated alongside native German students in mixed-ability groups. Sixty percent of the school’s students scored high enough on exams to be admitted to four-year colleges, compared with 27 percent of students nationally.

Mr. Shanker argued that charter schools could help reinvigorate the twin promises of American public education: to promote social mobility for working-class children and social cohesion among America’s increasingly diverse populations. There is considerable research to back up this vision. Richard M. Ingersoll, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has found that where teachers have more say in how their school is run, the school climate improves and teachers stay longer — trends that have been independently associated with increased student learning. And data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in Mathematics show that low-income fourth graders who attend economically integrated schools are as much as two years ahead of low-income students stuck in high-poverty schools.

Mr. Shanker believed deeply that unions played a critical role in democratic societies and wanted charter schools to be unionized. But he also wanted to take democratic values to an even higher level: Students would see workplace democracy in action firsthand in charter schools because they would see teachers who were active participants in decision making. Likewise, students in economically and racially integrated schools would learn on a daily basis that we all deserve a seat at democracy’s table.

Conservatives were unenthusiastic. Responding to Mr. Shanker’s 1988 speech, William Kristol, chief of staff to William J. Bennett, secretary of education in the Reagan administration, said that while the department “didn’t have problems” with the proposal, “we think there is lots of evidence that traditional methods are working.”

Over time, however, charter schools morphed into a very different animal as conservatives, allied with some social-justice-minded liberals, began to promote charters as part of a more open marketplace from which families could choose schools. Others saw in charter schools the chance to empower management and circumvent teachers unions. Only about 12 percent of the nation’s charter schools afford union representation for teachers.

What’s more, an astounding 24 percent of charter school teachers leave their school each year, double the rate of turnover in traditional public schools. Differences in average teacher age and experience, student demographics and school location account for less than half of this gap. Higher rates of firings and layoffs in charter schools are not sufficient to explain the difference in turnover either.

On average, charter schools are even more racially and economically segregated than traditional public schools, according to the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A. The diminished teacher influence and increased segregation might be tolerable if charter schools regularly outperformed traditional public schools, but in reality, although much media attention is showered on high-flying charter chains like KIPP and Success Academy, on the whole charters do about the same.

The good news is that the charter school model still offers an exciting opportunity to build new schools from scratch. A small but growing number are using their flexibility in governance and enrollment to increase the influence of teachers and to integrate their student bodies.

In recent years, teachers have formed or joined unions in schools like the Springfield Ball Charter School in Illinois, the Amber Charter School in Manhattan, and the Green Dot Public Schools in California. In some cases, these schools forge “thin” collective bargaining agreements that are tailored to the special needs of individual charter schools or networks.

Others, like Minnesota New Country School, Avalon School in St. Paul and Ideal School in Milwaukee, employ a teacher cooperative model where teachers share administrative duties. These schools generally boast high teacher satisfaction, low turnover rates and high levels of student achievement.

Other charter schools are intentionally integrated. Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy in Rhode Island, for example, was founded through a partnership between two urban and two suburban communities. Community Roots Charter School in Brooklyn, which receives many applications from middle-class families, maintains diverse enrollment by reserving 40 percent of kindergarten seats for students in nearby housing projects. High Tech High in California employs a lottery weighted by ZIP code that capitalizes on the unfortunate reality of residential segregation to yield a student body reflective of the impressive diversity of the San Diego metro area. All enjoy strong outcomes on traditional indicators of success, but they are also teaching students something more: how to thrive in a country rapidly growing more diverse.

Some high-performing charter schools, like City Neighbors Charter School in Baltimore and Morris Jeff Community School in New Orleans, have managed to pick up both threads of Mr. Shanker’s democratic vision.

This new band of smarter charter schools could move us beyond stale debates and back toward the original purpose of charter schools: to build powerful models from which the larger system of public education can learn. To be effective laboratories for reform, charter schools cannot be seen as hostile to traditional public schools. Good laboratories also need to give teachers the authority to suggest new approaches and the security to experiment without fear. And because charter schools don’t automatically reflect residential segregation patterns, they should be at the forefront of experimenting with how best to realize our nation’s enduring goal of making one out of many.

Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at
the Century Foundation. Halley Potter is a fellow at the Century Foundation and a former charter school teacher. They are co-authors of “A Smarter Charter: Finding What Works for Charter Schools and Public Education.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: The Original Charter School Vision. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe